Creativity is for amateurs. That's what I heard, growing up among professional artists in a rarefied artistic world. You weren't an "artist," that was a pretentious way of referring to yourself. Never tell anyone you are an "artist." Instead, visual artists are "painters," which has always reminded me not of someone working in a studio but of the spattered pair of guys who show up with ladders, dropcloths and rollers to improve your interior design with a coat of "Practical Beige." Someone who writes poetry must never call himself a "poet," which was a word more suitable to romance novels than a struggling wordsmith.

Since you were not an artist, you were a craftsman. It was appropriate to talk about "the work," or "the craft," or every so often, "the piece" or "the passage." But not about "My Symphony" let alone "My Masterpiece." A "real" artist must constantly duck under these broad beams of popular definition, and think of him or herself as a kind of "cultural worker," to use a faded Marxist phrase. Another acceptable metaphor was a kind of "medical" view, where you did art for "hygienic" reasons, suggesting that you should have a healthy artistic movement every day.

In that mid-twentieth century time, which is when I got my admittedly inadequate amount of art training, this was how you were to view things. I learned my craft mainly from my own parents, and from brief periods at the Boston Museum School and Boston University art school. This northeastern art milieu valued technique over everything. For instance, I attempted to learn to play the piano in my childhood. Piano playing was about playing major and minor scales and arpeggios until you could play them fast and clearly with no mistakes. Then it was about playing Bach inventions or other technical pieces until you could play those clearly and with no mistakes. In the years that I tried to learn to play piano, I don't remember a single instance where the teacher said that you could just sit down at the piano and improvise something. Music is a fixed text, from which no deviation is possible, at least for a student. And I would always be a student.

With the visual arts, technique also ruled. The idea was to learn the media, most often pencil, charcoal, or oil paint, and then use them to create realistic pictures. That is what I spent my art school days doing. I don't mean "photo-realism," which was a trend around that time. But I wasn't doing abstraction, either, unless it was a technical exercise. Art consisted of drawing and drawing and drawing and painting and painting, especially your still life or unclothed models, in a realistic style. This was and still is the "classical" way to learn art. But as with piano-playing, I don't remember being invited by my Boston University professors to make something that was not "realistic."

A quick trip to the current Boston University art school website reveals a combination of the traditional "realistic" style I learned, with more modernist output. Much has changed in art schools since I went there. But the artists are still academics.

What about "creativity," then? The professors of technique insist that if you do enough work and get technically perfect, then something "creative" and meaningful will emerge on its own without your having to invoke any divine intervention. Just keep on drawing figures or urban street scenes or playing those scales and arpeggios, and you will find something to make art about. But what if that doesn't happen, and you spend your artistic life painting endless tasteful figures and landscapes? Boiling beneath the placid levels of fine technical academic art is a world of inferior but wildly "creative" artistic efforts, some of it done by people whose only training is copying album covers or comic books. They don't mind calling themselves "creative artists," because unlike "fine art" painters, they have no taste and no shame.

Posted at 3:47 am | link